Facebook Acquires London Based Lightbox Team

Following on from Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the photographic customisation and sharing app Instagram. Facebook has now hired the team of London’s based mobile phone photo sharing service Lightbox. The seven-member team of Facebook responsible for its application development will now join the ranks of Facebook, and continue innovating mobile products.

The small team at Lightbox created a smart phone application which was designed to automatically create personal photos blogs from users uploaded photographs. Any users of Lightbox now have until June 15 to retrieve their photos from the service, and the application has already been removed from Google’s Play marketplace. Lightbox explains:

We started Lightbox because we were excited about creating new services built primarily for mobile, especially for the Android and HTML5 platforms, and we’re honored that millions of you have downloaded the Lightbox Photos app and shared your experiences with the Lightbox community.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users.

This means we’re no longer accepting new signups. If you’re an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.

Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

We’d like to thank the Lightbox community, our investors, and our families for supporting us during this journey.

Thai Tran & Nilesh PatelCo-founders, Lightbox

Yesterday Facebook also released new designs with more of an Instagram feel for its mobile site and also it’s Android and iOS applications.